John Updike Quotes
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Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being 'somebody,' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
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Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.
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I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.
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These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is.
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Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.
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Ronnie to Nelson 'For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games.'
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One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.
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All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
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No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.
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Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.
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His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.
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He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
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Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
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'The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are.'
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Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?
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re the human heart That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.
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'Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died.'
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There's more to being a human being than having your own way.
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This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.
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'...If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.'
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Nelson '...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife.'
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI.